Faith in a community

Luke mentions some significant items in Sunday's first reading (Acts 14:21-27). Perhaps the most significant is most frequently overlooked.

"After proclaiming the word in Perga, [Paul and Barnabas] went down to Attalia. From there, they sailed to Antioch, where they had been commended to the grace of God for the work they had now accomplished. And when they arrived, they called the church together and reported what God had done with them and how he had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles."

The evangelist is narrating the end of what many believe is Paul's first missionary journey. Where do Paul's evangelizing junkets begin and end? Many people guess Jerusalem. The reading tells us it's Antioch.

Community

Paul's made such a lasting impression on Christians that we regard him to be an independent faith contractor, a proselytizing Lone Ranger who was answerable to no one but God.

Luke paints no such picture. In Acts, Paul is a member of the church in Antioch. He and Barnabas are sent out by that community, and, as the reading tells us, they report back to that community.

If modern Scripture scholarship teaches us anything, it's that you can't properly understand any biblical text without understanding the community behind the text. Early Christianity existed only within the context of communities. These churches are at the heart of the faith Jesus' first disciples passed on to us.

The author of Revelation (Revelation 21:1-5a) informs us that such communities are a prefiguring of the "new heaven and new earth," which many first-century Christians anticipated. They were convinced of the message that the "loud voice" proclaims in the second reading: "Behold, God's dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people and God Himself will always be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, for the old order has passed away."

The only problem was that this old order didn't instantly disappear. It continued to show itself both in the external persecution endured by those for whom Revelation was written and in the internal tensions that threatened to tear the community apart.

This latter situation is clear from the many times St. John the Evangelist has Jesus, during the Last Supper, remind His followers to love (John 13:31-33a,34-35). "I give you a new commandment," He states, "love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should have love for one another."

Doing love

Jesus gives this command against the background of a foot washing. As I've mentioned before, Sister Sandra Schneid-ers' 1961 Catholic Biblical Quar-terly article pointed out that Jesus' actions that night not only demonstrate that it's the Christian community norm for "superiors" to serve "inferiors," but also, as Jesus demonstrates, that such service should extend beyond the superior's "field of expertise."

Jesus wasn't an expert foot-washer. Yet He chose that form of service to demonstrate His command of love.

Sister Sandra insists that true Christian communities are based not just on people doing things for others, but also on people doing things that at times cause insecurity for the do-er. That's true love of one another, the kind of love John longs for his church to experience, the kind of love Paul must have encountered in his Antioch community.

It's interesting to speculate what Paul would have done and been had he not committed himself to that specific group of Christians - and they to him.

(5/3/07)